Lost (7 page)

‘Oh God. What have I done?’

She felt for the lamp and turned it on, then rose and went to the basin in the corner of the room. She turned on the strip light above the mirror. Her face shocked her. The vein running down the centre of her forehead had swelled, altering her expression. Her eyes were opaque, like two holes. She was changed. Nothing, not even the death of her husband, had prepared her for this. She set her teeth hard against each other until her jaw muscles inflated and a pain developed. She stood clutching the basin with both hands, clenching her teeth, letting the desire to cry pass through and leave her. The policeman was right: she should not give in to her grief. She looked at herself again and realised that everything she had idly loved in herself had gone, leaving this behind.

It was just after 5 a.m. and the sky was still navy blue. Stuart walked up the main street towards the
mairie
. Santarosa was at once oppressively familiar and yet so remote; even the houses seemed to shrink from him as he passed. The wind blew dust into his eyes. People had closed their shutters to it because it was the
maestrale
, a wind that brought out the worst in everyone. His mother said it made cats mad and dogs despondent; it made women plague their husbands, men hit their wives and children crueller than ever.

There were some new graffiti in the main square. Huge red letters in support of the FNL bled on the
mairie
wall next to the legend: Raymond’s got Aids. A new sum had been daubed on the fountain: Drugs = Capital, and someone had written in elongated black letters: Allah is a faggot.

The wind filled the trees and drove dust in eddies around the empty square, and the weathercock on the church creaked incessantly.

Stuart went and stood in the arched entrance to the
mairie
and listened to the wind. He took a packet of mints from his pocket. They had been left behind in his car by Gérard. On the packet he read, ‘Soothing and refreshing. Recommended for smokers and those given to public speaking’. He smiled and put one in his mouth.

He took a small, spiral-bound notebook from his inside pocket. So rare were the occasions that he wrote anything down that he had had it for several years and it was not full. There were pages of notes from meetings with Central Office or with the magistrates. His attention always flagged and the notes were scant and impenetrable. On the last page was a diagram drawn by Monti, the only decent
informer he had ever had, the day before he was shot.

Gérard and Paul Fizzi were the first to arrive. Gérard always climbed out of the car in the same way, first one foot, then his hand gripping the roof for leverage to haul out his bulk. Paul Fizzi followed behind. He was in his forties, but his tight jeans and tennis shoes made him walk like a teenager. Stuart pitied his trapped bollocks, which he was always nudging peremptorily. They shook hands, turning their backs to the wind. Paul stood with his feet apart, his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, bouncing up and down against an imaginary chill. He grinned. ‘Ready to go?’ he said. Stuart smelled wine on his breath. Through his tan Paul looked pale. Stuart watched him take his cigarettes from the breast pocket of his jacket. His sleeves were rolled up and the veins stood out on his forearms. As he bent his head to light a cigarette, a lock of dark hair fell over his face.

‘Did you send the printouts?’

Paul nodded as he drew on his cigarette. Stuart had given up. He considered the fact that smoking had been his only serious occupation. It was a cigarette he wanted, not a mint. He spat it out.

‘No good?’ Gérard said. Stuart took the bag of mints from his pocket and offered him one.

Gérard looked at the mints.

‘No thanks.’

The three of them stood waiting while Paul clicked his gold lighter on and off. He also had a gold wristwatch and a Laguiole knife with which he munificently cut bread for the department at lunchtime. Stuart had heard that these were all presents from women.

The three of them watched the mayor approach. He was wearing a suit instead of his usual blue overalls. He cursed the
maestrale
apologetically as if he were responsible and shook first Stuart’s hand, then Gérard’s and Paul’s, without looking at them. Stuart remembered the mayor’s jumpy manner, which someone had once mistaken for the efficiency
that had made his reputation. He stood beside them, surveying the square. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, spat phlegm into it and put it back, repeating the action several times while firing questions at Stuart and not waiting for the answers.

‘You’ve got the old people’s clubhouse. That big enough you think? Who’s coming from the gendarmerie? Is it Morin? I haven’t met him. Who’s car is that, then? It’s the prosecutor’s.’

Stuart could feel the mayor’s eagerness grow as they watched Van Ruytens park beneath the chestnut trees and climb out of his car. The 2CV he drove irritated Stuart – like the pipe and the tweeds and everything about him. He walked briskly across the square towards them, carrying his briefcase, his face to the ground. He shook Stuart’s hand vigorously and for a long time, his shoulders curved inwards and his chin jutting forward, faking earnest.

‘Well done for getting this thing organised so speedily, Stuart,’ Van Ruytens said.

‘I didn’t, Prosecutor. It was the gendarmerie.’

Three CRS vans arrived and parked in a line behind the prosecutor’s car, blocking his exit. Van Ruytens watched, seemed to consider objecting, then decided against it. As the church clock struck the half-hour the gendarme, Morin, arrived at the head of four navy-blue buses. The mayor unlocked the room on the ground floor of the
mairie
with a large, rusty key.

Stuart stood at the front and watched the men fill the hall. There was a strong smell of baking bread coming from the
boulangerie
on the other side of the wall, filling the room with the incongruously voluptuous smell of yeast. He spoke before there was quiet and silence came with an abruptness that made his voice sound too loud. He kept his speech short, defining the nature of the search and introducing Morin, the captain of the gendarmerie, as soon as he could. For he was aware of Alice Aron standing there at the back of the room beside two men in CRS uniform, each with a tracker-dog.

As he stood aside for Captain Morin he noticed how his hands were shaking and he hid them in his pockets. The new captain was in his late fifties. He had silver, crew-cut hair and blue eyes that sloped downwards at the corners. He wore the ridiculous new gendarme’s sweater with the epaulettes sewn on. His eyes moved conscientiously back and forth from the spreadsheet in his hands to the assembly as he assigned a sector to each group. Stuart could see he had a scout leader’s mentality and he did not give him long on the island.

Christine Lasserre, the investigating magistrate, came and stood in the open door as the gendarme was finishing. Stuart nodded at her and she smiled gleefully at him like a mother who has spotted her child. She was a strange woman but he liked her. As the men began to leave, she came over to greet him.

‘I came to meet Madame Aron,’ she whispered. ‘I asked Monsieur Van Ruytens if he minded. If I am called it’s simpler for her if she can put a face to my name.’

Stuart nodded. Alice Aron was still at the back of the room, hemmed in by the mayor and the prosecutor.

‘You’re up early,’ Stuart said.

‘I’m not a great sleeper anyway,’ Lasserre said, touching Stuart’s arm.

She stood beside him, fingering the silver pendant she always wore. He was not sure, but he thought it might be a pear. He had always liked Lasserre, even at the beginning when she had just crossed over from civil law, having sat the exams at the age of fifty. The others were irritated by her homeliness. But Stuart saw how quickly she learned. She was not afraid to look stupid.

‘Stuart. Are you Scottish?’ she asked him.

He shook his head.

‘Stuart was the name they gave to the illegitimate children left behind by the English after they occupied the island. It’s a generic term for bastard.’

Lasserre smiled.

‘You must have English in you then,’ she said. She nodded at Alice Aron, who was still trapped. ‘Shall we wait for her outside?’

Stuart followed her out through the door. Lasserre leaned back against the wall of the
mairie
and looked earnestly at him. Her very blue eyes were watering from the wind.

‘What do you think, Stuart?’ A gust of wind swept her grey hair over her face and she held it back with her hand, waiting patiently.

He felt she was on his side, but a policeman’s mistrust of investigating magistrates made him hesitate.

‘Come on,’ she said, smiling. ‘You think the child’s been kidnapped and you’re hoping Santini has something to do with it.’

Stuart spoke his mind, almost in anger at having been encouraged to do so.

‘Russo’s deputy for the north of the island. So theoretically Santini can hope for a peaceful life …’

‘Theoretically, yes.’

She held up her hand. The journalist Angel Lopez was coming towards them at a jog, the vents of his suit flapping behind him.

‘Your friend.’

Stuart’s heart sank.

‘Who told him?’

Lasserre smiled. Angel Lopez took her hand and held it, inclining his head slightly.

‘
Madame
le
juge
.’

Lopez had left Spain over twenty years ago but he still spoke with a strong accent. He faced Stuart and clicked his heels then smiled, revealing his little grey teeth. His complexion was sallow and his cheeks were perforated with acne scars.

Lopez slid his hands into the pockets of his suit, and lifted his shoulders.

‘Bad wind,’ he said. ‘When do they set off?’

‘What are you doing here?’ Stuart asked.

‘I’m doing my job. Like you, Stuart.’ He grinned and turned to Lasserre. ‘So you’ve been called,
Madame
le
juge
,’ he said, taking his hands from his pockets and folding his arms.

‘Do stop calling me
Madame
le
juge
, Lopez. No, I have not been called.’

‘So …’ He opened his hands. ‘Why are you here?’

‘A child’s disappeared,’ she said. ‘I’m here in case they don’t find him.’

‘A rich child,’ Lopez said, nodding sadly. ‘Is that the mother I saw? The beautiful dark woman.’

That Lopez should pronounce her beautiful made Stuart suddenly uncomfortable. Lopez knew how to provoke discomfort. His method was always to find out where it hurt and press hard. A former revolutionary from GRAPO, he had come to the island in the seventies after a spell in one of Franco’s prisons. He had heard of Titi’s movement and had come to join him. When Titi was killed he had come down to the city and started to write for the
Islander
, his past as an anti-Francist giving him an aura that covered his bad writing. Beneath his formal Spanish manners he still had the same uncompromising logic of a revolutionary Marxist.

‘Lopez, listen. If you’re going to do a story on this, I want to talk to you first.’

‘Sure,’ Lopez said. ‘I can understand that.’

Van Ruytens was coming towards them with Alice Aron at his side.

‘I hear she’s English,’ Lopez said. ‘Does she understand everything?’

‘She speaks perfectly,’ Stuart said.

The prosecutor was wearing new glasses, a ridiculous pair of narrow rectangles without frames that made him look like a glass-blower. He shook hands with everyone with a misplaced enthusiasm. Alice Aron stood on the edge of the group, taller than all the men, her bag on her shoulder.

Van Ruytens introduced her to Lasserre, then to Lopez.
Stuart looked for her reaction to the journalist, but her face was a pale mask.

‘And Stuart you know, of course.’

Stuart nodded at Alice and turned quickly to Lopez.

‘Meet me in my office at ten.’ He nodded at Lasserre, who smiled at him.

‘We’ll talk after the search,’ she said, then turned her attention to Alice. Those in the force who disliked her spread rumours that Christine Lasserre was a lesbian. Stuart knew nothing about her private life but guessed that, like him, she simply did not have one.

He left the two women and crossed the square towards the CRS vans. Gérard was talking to the two CRS with the tracker-dogs. Stuart touched him on the arm as he passed.

‘I’ll see you at the office.’

Gérard smiled and held up two fat fingers, and Stuart felt a wave of affection for him.

When he reached Santini’s house the sky was flecked with the colours of dawn. The wind seemed to have silenced the birds. He stood at the gate, leaning forward and watching a small square of courtyard through a rusty hole in the iron. He pulled on the bell cord and heard it ring in the distance. He remembered the last time he had been at Coco’s house, the summer before, for Monti’s murder, and watching Coco control his anger while he, Gérard and Paul turned his place upside down and found nothing.

He rang again and then banged on the iron gate with his fist. He glanced up at the passageway that joined the Santinis’ house to the Battestis’. Raymond’s car, an orange Fiat with a black stripe running along each side, was parked in the tiny square. It was hard to see how he got it in and out. Five cats lay beneath its bonnet, sheltered from the wind. He raised his fist to bang again and the door opened. Liliane Santini stood before him in a yellow nightdress. She held her hands clasped in front of her and looked at him with such distaste that he smiled.

‘He’s not here,’ she said.

‘I know.’

Liliane Santini looked up at Stuart, for she was short, shorter these days than most of the village children. She was overweight, had been for as long as she could remember, and had difficulty climbing the stairs, though she was still in her early fifties. Her small, youthful hands were her only adornment and she looked after them. She wore gloves for the vegetable garden and for housework, and she put cream on them regularly. Betty, who was a trained manicurist, often practised on her for free. She looked at her watch.

‘You’re too early. It’s illegal.’

‘Not for a friendly visit.’

‘I’ll tell him you called.’ She began to close the gate.

‘A child’s disappeared,’ he said, blocking the gate with his foot.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A child. A little boy disappeared without trace yesterday afternoon. He was playing in the square.’

She looked at him benevolently. He showed her the photograph of the blond, smiling child. She looked at it longer than she meant to, took in the big smile and the slightly worried look in the eyes. She thought of her own grandchildren whom she had never seen. What she would have given to have a photo of them like this one. She handed the photograph back and watched him put it into his pocket. If the child’s fate depended on Antoine Stuart, she pitied the mother.